1. Driving up the mountains on the way home one night on the 80, there was a great bloody smear of elk. It was gorey and horrid looking, with the murdered animal in the median, and it's blood and dark meat chunks spread across the fast lane. I was driving in the middle lane, chatting with Jared, we both saw the elk, he looked at the elk, my head whipped up to see, certain I would see, another animal in the lane in front of me. No. It was not foreshadowing. I was certain that the scene called for a second elk, one that I hit, or a live one in the lane in front of me. It wasn't foreshadowing yet, anyway. For the next week, every time I drove past that spot, I braced myself and waited. It wasn't intellectual-- it was some kind of visceral sense of story. What is the timeframe for the second elk? My writer self knows all too well: my whole life. I have been opened up to the possibility that there could always be the elk to echo that first one.
2. I was wearing my white doublebreasted Italian wool coat and eating tomato basil soup at Carlucci's. I ordered half a goat cheese sandwich with tomato soup and I was checking email and eating red soup in my white coat. I had just finally gotten it back from the dry cleaners. "This is really good tension," I thought. "Why won't the character take off her coat? It's all too obvious." I didn't drip soup on the coat.
3. We were walking down near Moab on a camping trip with Steve. He told us about a video he'd seen of bugs that divebomb your eyeball and in the last dying moment lay their eggs. You think nothing of it until you have a big lump under your eyelid, and when you go to the eyedoctor, he uncovers the teeming eyeball bug larvae. (Fortunately they're not common.) Just after he saw that video, one of his co-workers had an eyeball lump and Steve said, "you'd better go get that checked because it might be bugs," and it freaking was eyeball bugs! "Watch out," I told him, "there will be one more eyeball bug incident in your life." Am I cursing him to a literary life? As if he's in a movie and I'm sitting in the audience all self-satisfied because I know where this is headed?
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3 comments:
Haha, I love this. Although now I'm freaked out about EYEBALL BUGS! WHAT! You need to link to the video. :)
Last night, my gas tank was on empty and I pulled into a station EVERY gas pump (there were twelve) was out of order! They all had signs, fluttering in the wind. I had that same thought: "This is forshadowing." I drove to work with the Empty light on and just knew my car would die on the middle of the expressway because I was too lazy to drive two more blocks last night to another gas station.
Ok, that was the most tense blog post I've ever read! Wonderful and awful. And..EYEBALL BUGS? I really didn't need another thing to have a phobia about. But, I love it! So gross...I've heard of awful stories with spiders laying eggs under people's skin, too.
And, I hit a deer once. I hope it's the only one. I still need to make an offering to its spirit.
oh my god, I don't think I could handle the eyeballbug video. your root hand man still haunts me. (I think it's quite possible that's going to happen to me. and then I won't be able to itch my eyeballs.)
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